Author Name: creamtea-from-FAP
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: PS/SS, CoS, PoA, GoF, OoTP, HBP.
Genre: Book 7. Adventure, thriller.
Main Character(s): H. D. Beta: Anise. Some test-reading by SUM.
Ship(s): Ships are touched on as part of the narrative, but the story isn't about the ships. Ships are: H/L, D/Hr. These ships: H/G, R/Hr, D/G are included – but not in a good way!
Summary: ALT BOOK 7: STORY ALREADY WRITTEN AND BEING PUBLISHED WITH FREQUENT UPDATES. FORTY CHAPTERS. What's it about? Love potions; emotional shoot-outs, expulsions, hex-fights, fist-fights, kidnappings, bank-jobs, secret weapons and castle-battles. And … DRACO!
Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.
Chapter 36
There was screaming and spellfire, smoke and the swoop of Dementors. The battlements seemed to be thick with screeching, clawing Pygmy Puffs and with children screaming and tearing: at themselves, at teachers, at each other.
"If we ever get out of this, I'm going to put that little bastard Hinchley in detention forever!"
"Remus," admonished Professor McGonagall, horrified, "- language!"
Remus flung the lashing, snarling Hinchley off him, hand instinctively flying to the side of his face and hissing with the smart as he drew his fingers back and inspected the blood oozing from his torn flesh.
"Well, I've heard of werewolf bites boy – but boy bites werewolf?"
Hinchley sprang again and Remus just had time to get him with a Jelly Legs, then took a grimly determined second go and smacked Hinchley unconscious with a hard-flung Stupefy.
Harry could see the two professors, plus Justin Finch-Fletchley and Terry Boot, protecting a group of small children as they were driven back under an onslaught of Puffs and their furious, screeching pupils.
Harry distinctly heard Justin Finch-Fletchley's posh, complaining, carrying tones, "I knew I should have gone to Eton!"
Hogwarts was in a rampage.
The Pygmy Puffs had 'gone off' inside Hogwarts and were causing their children to attack teachers and anyone else who trammeled them. Teachers and un-Puffed children had been driven out onto the battlements. Above them, flying on his broom, Harry horribly wondered if it had been some herd instinct on behalf of the Puffs: to drive their enemies over the edge, like cattle driven off a cliff.
There was only one advantage the Puff-less had over the Puff-children: those affected by the Puffs had lost their magic under the effect, most of them had even hurled away their wands. It was probably something to do with their diminished sense of self and self-control. If they had retained their magic, they would have been impossible to resist.
Astoundingly, the children – attacked and attackers alike – were in their night-clothes! The attack had come when everyone had been dressed for bed, sleeping en masse in the Great Hall for the sake of security following the Slughorn rumours.
The wealthy Justin was in a pair of expensive stripy pyjamas, hand-made carpet slippers, and a richly-textured, monogrammed night-coat. Terry was in a well-worn Man United footie top and rumpled, pyjama bottoms.
A particularly vicious little Puff-girl, her Puff on her shoulder, was incongruously wearing a frilly, cotton nightie, fluffy slippers, and a flower-patterned bed-jacket.
Harry desperately tried to get to them.
Remus was on a lower section of battlements, not one near the roof, but one near the outer curtain wall. They must have been in the Great Hall at the time of the uprising, and Remus and McGonagall and some Puff-less children had been driven to the nearest outside space. They had been pushed along a battlement, toward another section of the castle wall.
Remus was trying to fend off attacking kids without actually harming them, even though they were going flat out to kill him.
Away to one side, arrayed at the edge of the forest, Harry saw that the centaurs were lined up, nervously watching the raging battle: Harry feared that to them Hogwarts must have seemed like some great Mediaeval fortress besieged by a hellish enemy, with those in the fortress having no chance of winning. He recalled that only Firenze had attended Dumbledore's funeral. Although the rest had done the honour of shooting their bows from across the lake, they had not come, not even for Dumbledore, and now he was dead.
The Centaurs were a thick, jumbled fringe at the forest boundary, many still just within the safety of the trees. They each had their bows and quivers-ful of arrows, but not a one shot. Instead, they looked at each other nervously, heads tossing back, almost in a fretful, whinnying gesture, hooves anxiously pawing the ground, back legs occasionally kicking out with tension.
But they did not come onto the losing side.
Harry remembered Bill's reports that the Centaurs wouldn't come to Hogwarts' aid: that they could win benefits from Voldemort simply by staying out of the fight. And what had Hogwarts ever really done for them?
Harry saw the shaggy-coated, Bane waving an arm angrily, pointing back in the direction of the forest, indicating that they should return to it. A grey, hard-faced centaur whom Harry had once met, clearly supported him. But others looked far less certain, and many milled about, hooves stomping in rising unease as the increasingly panicked, high, thin screaming of children carried across the night.
Ronan, with his red hair, red beard, and gleaming chestnut body, stood silent, staring. Magorian, with his russet body, proud, high-cheekboned face and long black hair, stared over the gesticulating Bane – his gaze upon the castle.
Harry recalled that Magorian had been one of those arguing for the safety of he and Hermione that time in the forest: we do not touch the innocent.
On his broom, Harry dodged and swooped.
The sky was streaked by the hooded, dry, rattling Dementors, swooping about for prey, floating like long-trailed jellyfish in a tank, riding the eddies and waves, ready to ensnare their victims then hold them as their gaping, horrid mouths closed in for the soul-sucking kill.
Harry careened between them, but he had always been a juicy target for them, and rebounding off the unyielding wards he had become surrounded by them, his panic rising as their pressing numbers grew ever greater.
Guarding a small contingent of Puff-less second-years, being beaten back by an onslaught of savage, screaming, attackers, Professor McGonagall could only let out a high-pitched scream as she looked up and saw him trying to beat them off.
Remus tried to divert his wand power into weakening a spot in the wards to allow Harry to escape through it, but Harry was now almost toppling from his broom, blood freezing, teeth chattering from the assault. He tried to lash out with a Patronus, but he had so little to be happy about now and one wouldn't come and …
Part of him almost wanted to let go.
He'd lost Ron, he'd lost Luna; what Malfoy had said about Sirius … if you weren't so sure you were guilty, you wouldn't be screaming so hard that you weren't!
Then another set of panicked roars, ones very close, actually in the air next to him. Harry shook his vision clear and saw, floating in mid-air about fifty yards away, a struggling figure, screaming. Silhouetted against the black sky, it was a cut-out shape against the stars. It jerked like a puppet even as its mouth was open wide, delivering scream after terrified scream.
There was a momentary illuminating flash of red spell-fire, and Harry saw that it was McNair.
He was suspended in mid-air, screaming, flailing about. And then Harry saw what was really holding him up: a stream of magic, determinedly emanating from the wand of a wizard on the ground: Scrimgeour.
Floating wildly in mid-air, defenceless, powerless to save himself, McNair was horribly like the family of Muggles, back during the wizard riot at the Quidditch World Cup when McNair had been among those Death Eaters holding them aloft, brandishing them like trophies of victory or figures of sport.
The thrashing, flailing, howling McNair held no wand, but did have a mind ever-brimming with bitterness, hidden miseries …
A Dementor's feast.
Confused, distracted by such a fulsome banquet, the Dementors hovered and then, in increasing numbers, floated away from Harry and drifted over to the easier target of McNair.
Soon they would be thick about him … feeding …
Harry jerked his broom, half intending to somehow drive the Dementors off.
And got less than a yard before he was slammed to a halt, his broom giving a sudden, frightening lurch, and for a split second he thought he was going to fall into the morass of heaving Inferi below.
He aimed the broom again, trying to drive toward the ever-thickening knot about the whimpering McNair: a tightening knot of now-feasting Dementors. Again the broom lurched, and he realised it was completely out of his control. He couldn't turn it. He couldn't direct it at all. Instead of flying, he was now veering unevenly back toward … the Minister for Magic.
Scrimgeour was dragging him back.
Harry's out of control broom reminded him of that time in first-year, during the Quidditch match when Quirrell had gotten control of his Nimbus. Hagrid had said that it was virtually impossible to deflect a broom in mid-flight, that only powerful Dark Magic could do it.
Well, Scrimgeour was doing it now.
"NO!"Harry was panicking, was Scrimgeour aiming to kill him? To get rid of someone whom he knew suspected about he and Amelia Bones?
Harry lurched wildly, looking up and under him, craning to look back at the now moaning McNair who was trapped amidst the rattling, squelching, sucking mass, now supported in the air by the Dementors themselves.
With McNair's screams now trembling to nothing as the Dementors gorged upon him, those at the periphery of the feeding group edged out, unable to fully sate their thirsts, and turned their attentions back to Harry.
On his current forced trajectory, he would not be able to escape them.
Scrimgeour was going to kill him in front of hundreds of witnesses: disguising it as a Dementor attack.
At Harry's back, Remus ploughed all his effort into weakening the wards at just one single spot as Professor McGonagall desperately fought back the hoards of ravening, blood-crazed children. With a frantic burst of energy, Remus opened a small vortex in the ward, and the unseen force on Harry's broom swirled him wildly about and propelled him through it. He caught on the edge of the closing vortex as he went, his broom spinning sideways from the impact and smashing into a stone wall.
It splintered in two. His hard-used broom had finally given up.
Toppled to the floor, Harry looked disbelievingly at the bits.
Sirius had bought him that.
Sirius.
"Harry? Harry!"
Harry came-to, prompted by Remus' shouting, and then shrieked out, pointing at the cluster of Dementors over the battlements.
"Scrimgeour was trying to kill me! He had control of my broom!"
"Kill you? He was trying to save you. He was trying to get you back to the ground!"
"No! He fed McNair to the Dementors. He was going to do the same to me!"
"He used him as bait, Harry! He had to – they were all over you. He needed to throw them bait, and he picked McNair!"
Harry stared at Remus, disbelieving, aghast, even as Remus turned about and re-commenced battling the Puffs.
But … the Minister could have just as easily sent him smashing into the castle walls or down into the Inferi, but he had reversed Harry's flight path and sent him through the vortex to safety – well, the relative safety of the battlements rather than the Dementor-filled skies.
Harry struggled to lever himself up from the floor and in his confusion a Puff took it's chance and leapt at him: all snarls, blazing eyes and teeth.
Harry was so astounded by the sight that he could not even react.
"Incendio!" screeched Professor McGonagall, deflecting her wand power from her barrier of Protegos for the second it took to attack the Puff. The creature exploded in mid-air, a ball of scorched fur, the atmosphere thick with the stink of burnt hair.
"I may be getting on a bit, Mr. Potter," cried the Professor with a slight tinge of the vindicated, "but a Wizard's Battle isn't about age, is it?"
A second Puff leapt – like a screeching hob-goblin – and this time Harry was more ready. No time to go for his wand, he whipped his broken broom handle around in a quick, fast arc, and caught the Puff a stunning clout, sending it flying over the battlements like a ball hit with a rounders bat.
The last thing his broom could do for him.
In the screaming chaos, nearby a cat rolled over and over, hissing and slashing, valiantly trying to battle the biting Puffs clamped to it. Harry grabbed his wand and shot the rolling, hissing bundle of fur: the cat was unconscious and out of action but so were the four tearing Puffs which had been viciously latched to it.
There were just too many Puffs: there had been hundreds of them at Hogwarts, and each one now had a child enslaved to its ferocious bidding.
"What are these things?" screeched Remus over his shoulder. "The school's gone mad!"
"Malfoy says they're 'shake'n'bakes'!"
"They're what?"
"Experimental animals, illegal Death Eater experiments. They're designed to send kids nuts!"
Harry realised that he had not even had the time to tell Remus or Professor McGonagall about what was really going on – that this whole Puff-attack was simply a diversion!
"This whole thing – the Dementors, giants, Inferi – they were just meant to get you to raise the wards, trapping yourselves inside and locking the Aurors outside. And then the Puffs were set off to pin you all down. But it's all just a distraction! The thing that really matters – it's the Death Eaters, they're headed for the Chamber! They want everyone screaming and running about! They want everyone pinned down so that they could do what they liked in the Chamber. They want the castle in a rampage, so even if you found out they were there, you couldn't do anything about stopping them when they set the weapon off!"
"Weapon? But the Chamber's empty!" yelled Remus, fending off seething Puffs. "The Basilisk's dead!"
Away to one side, McGonagall looked uncomfortable.
"It's not the Basilisk!" shouted Harry. "That was never the weapon. It was just there as some kind of," Harry flung about desperately for a term, "some kind of guard-snake! It was only ever there to guard the real weapon!"
"The real weapon?" Professor McGonagall suddenly looked very alert.
"Something Slytherin left there: something to annihilate all those unworthy to be called wizard. The Death Eaters are going to set it off!"
Justin Finch-Fletchley's wand aim wavered as he threw Harry a panicked look. Justin was a Muggleborn, and they all knew of the legend of the Chamber.
"Eyes front, Mister Finch-Fletchley!" barked Professor McGonagall.
"Yeah – get on with it, Finchie!" yelled Terry Boot.
Justin continued battling, teeth gritted.
Remus was so aghast at the Death Eater plan that for a second even his Protego wavered - and a Puff leapt at him, flying forward as though from a catapult, all claws and gaping jaws. Remus only just managed to Incendio it, and Harry had to duck to miss the now-blazing, screaming bundle. He looked, horrified, as the writhing Puff hit the floor, and Remus shot it with a spell so hard that it blew apart into fiery fragments.
Harry stared at Remus, but Remus wasn't going to apologise or be ashamed, "Is there anyone to stop them down in that Chamber?"
"Draco Malfoy and Hermione's there too and so's Ginny Weasley, but it's not like she's going to pull herself together and save the day, is it? And Malfoy's over-estimated his advantage, he thinks the Death Eaters think he's one of them, but the Death Eaters don't care. It's to do with Voldemort and his obsession with immortality – Malfoy's going to be sacrificed for Voldemort!"
Remus and Professor McGonagall shot each other horrified looks.
"Is there anyone else who can help them?"
Harry swallowed, before delivering his next word, "Snape."
Remus almost hissed, and Professor McGonagall's teeth actually bared.
"He's on our side."
"WHAT?"Harry ignored Remus' yelled interjection, "Professor Dumbledore said so, and I believe him."
"He killed the Professor, Harry. The Professor was wrong."
"No, he was right. Professor Dumbledore told me so tonight!"
He was aware that both Remus and McGonagall were shooting him some very funny looks. He told them all about going back in time.
"Back in -? But why didn't you get him to change the future?" yelped Remus. "Why didn't you tell him about what happened on the tower? Why did it still turn out the way it did?"
Harry compressed his mouth into a grim, straight line. There was no point in talking about that now: not unless he just wanted to end up sobbing and raging and kicking things as he had before. "And it gets worse! Scrimgeour knows that Voldemort, the Horcruxes and the Death Eaters will all be down in the Chamber." He raised his voice and shouted over the roar of the battle, "He plans to get what kids he can out of Hogwarts but then raze the school to the ground on top of everyone in the Chamber – burying them, crushing them under the school's weight!"
Even Terry Boot wobbled at that one.
"What?" screeched Professor McGonagall. "But I've got three of my students down there!"
"He's prepared to sacrifice them. He says he has 'responsibilities'!"
"Responsib -? Well, I'd like to see him try! Raze the castle? He won't have a hope!"
"They will be dismantling the wards to send in help, Minerva – when they do that, they can get in!"
"And? I'd like to see an idiot Auror tackle Hogwarts!"
"They won't be using Aurors."
Harry's voice had gone strangely hollow and the two professors cast swift glances at him only to see him staring blankly toward the dark horizon. "They're not using Aurors to raze Hogwarts." Harry pointed, "They're using them."
The two professors turned.
What they saw was so astonishing that they, Justin, Terry, and even the Pygmy Puff crazed children, all stopped.
Far specks in the sky, but closing at a terrifying speed, were creatures which looked like something carved in stone on the walls of a Mediaeval cathedral: monstrous figures of dark imagination, designed to scare any sinners off the easy, wide road to Hell and back on the rocky path toward Heaven. They had long heads, bat-like wings, rib-cage bodies, great, red, glowing eyes, the heavy, springy, muscular hind-limbs of dragons but the fleshy shoulders and even more powerful hairy fore-limbs of giants, ending in horribly human-looking hands.
From their nostrils fumed a haze of flame and super-heated air, ready to blaze out in a fireball at an enemy. And what they could not raze with fire, they could simply tear apart.
Next to him, Harry heard Remus gasp, and he explained.
"Part-dragon, part-Thestral, part-giant. Product of a secret, artificial, experimental breeding program by the Ministry. Frighteningly fast, immensely strong and fire-breathing: Heliopaths."
xxxxx
In the red, exploding, spell-strewn night, they were still stuck on the outcrop of low battlement, with moaning Inferi below, rattling Dementors above, howling giants flinging rocks, and about fifty Puffs and their blood-crazed kids – Puff-Puppets, Remus had termed them - hemming them in and forcing them back into a corner.
Harry had not even had the time to tell anyone about Mrs. Weasley, what had really happened to Ron, what had really happened to Luna, to tell Remus about Tonks, about how she had only ever pursued him under the compulsion of Imperius.
Part of him wondered if Remus might actually be relieved.
There was a door at their back – the reason why they'd picked that corner – but they could not get it open. Remus and McGonagall had both tried desperately, but not even for the Head of Hogwarts would it open. The castle had sealed itself against entrance.
The Puff-Puppets, relentlessly pushing forward against Protegos, fingers flexed into claw-shapes, eyes wild, mouths snarling – God, was that Lavender Brown? – were now only about two yards away. With spittle flying and teeth bared, they reached forward against the invisible protective arc, trying to snatch and rip.
Their Puffs hissed on their shoulders, ready to spring forward themselves.
Harry had the unconscious cat stuffed limply down the front of his zipped up jacket, a squishy bundle of warm black fur with an ugly little, squashed-up face and a solidly beating heart. He wasn't sure, but he thought he recognised it from the train-ride into school. He thought it was Millicent Bulstrode's.
He'd scooped it up as he'd shuffled backwards. Leaving it there, defenceless, had simply been unthinkable.
Behind Harry, Remus was now reduced to physically tugging, pushing and kicking at the door in an effort to get it open.
If they couldn't get off the battlement, then within seconds they were going to be torn to pieces, wrenched limb from limb.
Harry was roaring at one of their attackers, "When you wake up and come to your senses, Finnegan, I'm going to kick your arse in!"
The door popped open behind them, unlocked from the inside and Neville's round face appeared, "Thought I could hear your shouting, Harry. Recognise it anywhere."They tumbled through the door, bolting it even as a surge of attackers thumped against it.
They were now inside the castle, on a landing inside the Entrance Hall, half-way up the moving staircases. It wouldn't have been a bad position - if the moving staircases hadn't been swirling around wildly, disorientated by the emergency wards. They were swinging about like colossal, out of control, crane derricks, careening about randomly, occasionally crashing into each other with mighty reverberating clangs that saw huge chunks of marble fly off to smash into the walls.
A lot of the corridors and landings which had led off the stairs were now reduced to broken-off stubs of stone as the milling staircases had smashed the ends off them.
There was no staircase from their stub of landing.
The Entrance Hall floor, fifty feet below them, was thick with Puffs.
The air rang with screams and spell-explosions.
Above, about and below them on the various landings, were herds of children: either seething throngs of Pygmy-Puppets or tight little knots of unaffected children, desperately trying to hold them off.
About the walls, the paintings roared advice to the struggling, Puff-less children – 'duck', 'look out behind you!', 'over here, to me!'. Portraits raced from picture to picture, traveling the walls to reach children. The ghosts looked ahead down passages for them, shouting if it was all clear, floating through walls to see if rooms were safe.
Peeves floated overhead, screeching and throwing bits of chipped-off staircase at clumps of Puff-Puppets – Harry rather suspected that Peeves might secretly be enjoying that part.
Harry could not see Phineas Nigellus – he hadn't seen him since he'd called for him on his miniature and he had not come.
Away on another smashed-off bit of landing, Filch was thrashing his arms about, shouting. Harry wasn't sure what at, until he saw a knot of Puffs draw back from something there: the dead body of a scrawny, dust coloured cat - Mrs. Norris.
Harry could hear Filch's scream from here.
The Puffs stared up at Filch and sprang, knocking him sprawling so that he got tangled up in an empty suit of armour which fell apart under him. The screaming, sobbing, raging Filch had to abandon the body of his beloved cat and limp hurriedly off, pursued by Puffs and trailing bits of armour as he went.
A short figure dressed in a bazaar collection of clothing - too many hats and purple socks – wriggled to the front of a knot of besieged Puff-less children and pushed a hand in the direction of the besiegers, palm-forward, like a stop-sign.
The besiegers were pushed back as though by an invisible moving blockade.
Easy.
It was Dobby.
Harry turned to Remus, "Where are the other elves!"
House-elves had immense magical power, Dobby had once sent Lucius Malfoy shooting down a flight of stairs just by pointing a finger at him.
"They're in the kitchen, Harry."
"What? Why don't they help!"
"The elves can't help us, Harry. Wizards have trained them too thoroughly over the millennia: they can't attack wizards - and the Puff-children are still wizards, and the Puff-children won't let the elves attack the Puffs!The elves are in a terrible state. Wizards are attacking wizards – the elves don't know what to do!"
Dobby was an exception. Dobby thought for himself and would take action accordingly. But Dobby was practically one of a kind.
Harry expected no further elf-help tonight.
Below them, a thicket of Puppets hurled themselves repeatedly against the great double-doors leading to the Great Hall, the doors resounding under them.
"What's happening?" Harry shouted as he nodded toward the closed oak doors.
"Hagrid, Madame Hooch, Sinistra, Poppy – a lot of the teachers were in there when the Puffs went off! We had all the children in the Great Hall as a security measure, and the Professors were patrolling it as the Puff attacks started. It was chaos, half of the Puff-children ran out screaming, but half stayed. They Puff-less children left in there are barricaded with the Professors on the dais, behind the overturned teachers' refectory table. The door's slammed shut to stop any more Puff-children getting back in to re-enforce the others!"
Harry looked about him. They had been rescued by a strange crew, the eccentric mix of which made Harry start – not to mention the fact that they were all in night-attire. Neville's presence - dressed in red and yellow checked pyjamas which Harry just knew his formidable grandmother had bought for him - was a given but … Theodore Nott and Malfoy's two troglodyte companions, Crabbe and Goyle? Nott evidently slept in worn, baggy pyjama-bottoms and a faded, loose t-shirt and was wearing a pair of well-worn trainers instead of slippers, but Crabbe and Goyle were wearing pristine, long, traditional, white night-gowns, matching Wee-Willie-Winky night-caps, and fleecy bed-socks.
Harry tried not to laugh hysterically – more hysteria than laughter.
Neville now had a nasty gash on his forehead, almost in the same place where Harry had his infamous scar. Nott was bleeding from what looked like a slash to the side of his face. Crabbe and Goyle appeared unmarked – though Harry found himself fighting off the uncharitable thought that they probably had such thick skins that any Pygmy Puff that tried to bite them would probably break its teeth! Any missile flung at them, would probably just bounce off!
Neville looked apprehensive but determined, Nott was jittering with nerves, teeth chattering. Crabbe and Goyle were simply looking about them almost puzzled – if their faces could ever register anything so intellectual as puzzlement. On them it was more like a gormless incomprehension. Both Neville and Nott held their wands gripped in their fists, Nott's wand shaking with nervous tension. In contrast, the lumpen, mute, stolid Crabbe and Goyle had abandoned their wands and instead grasped their beaters' bats in fists the size of Keepers' mitts.
It was odd: until then Harry simply hadn't realised just how big Crabbe and Goyle were – they were practically gigantic: totally un-natural for schoolboys.
Enormous, they looked absurd in their Dickensian-style nighties and caps.
No-one bothered to comment on how weird the rescue group was: the unappreciated Gryffindor whom the Hat had wanted to put in Hufflepuff, the bitter, outsider Slytherin, and two great lumps whom the Hat might just as well have played dip-dip-dip with for all the difference it made.
The situation was way beyond comments such as, 'what are you doing here?'.
Help, was help.
There was no stable staircase connecting to their bit of landing. With a jolt, Harry realised that the unlikely rescue crew must have heard the desperate screaming of people trying to escape danger, and had leapt across the swingeing staircases, jumping from crashing step to crashing step, risking being decapitated or crushed at every go, until they'd got across to open the door.
If the situation hadn't been so utterly desperate, they'd have been writing odes to the sheer heroism of it. As it was, there was no time to even mention it because the door behind them was now shuddering in its frame as their pursuers battered at it.
They had to get off that landing.
Away on the floor far below them, flung wherever it may land, was a single, abandoned child's slipper. Harry was gripped by the horrible, chilling realisation that there might yet still be a torn-off foot inside it.
Below them the thick, swarming, pink and purple carpet of Puffs seemed to be milling about like technicolour rats on a rubbish dump. The milling rats parted, to reveal the fallen, oddly angled body of what had been Professor Flitwick.
Harry felt a sick lurch: there was no way out there.
Off on a fourth-floor landing, Harry distinctly saw Ernie McMillan – pristine, blue pyjamas, freshly ironed, and a tartan, woolen night-coat - shooting a string of Stupefies into a mass of Pygmy-Puppets as a shaking Hannah Abbott – frilly, nylon nighty - held them off with a very wobbly Protego. Even from this range, Harry could see that Hannah was crying with fright, but still doing it anyway. He gritted his teeth though, because Ernie was aiming his arms around a lot before he threw each spell, as though somehow striking postures would make a difference. Typical Ernie, Harry thought, he hadn't changed, he had been just the same in D.A. training: flourishing his wand unnecessarily, allowing his opponent time to get under his guard.
Screaming and movement and action was everywhere.
Trapped on another landing, Richie Coote and Jimmy Peakes – both baggy bottoms and t-shirts boys - were guarding a gaggle of terrified first-years, holding both their wands and beater's bats in their hands as they backed up along the landing, being pressed hard by a thicket of Puppets. A springing Puff leapt under Jimmy's wand arm and moved to bite him, only to be smashed aside at the last second by Richie's bat. The Puff squealed and fell to the floor, whereupon Richie walloped it mercilessly again and again with overhead blows until it stopped.
On a third-floor, isolated, smashed-off stub of landing, was a tall, smoke-blackened figure dressed in a peculiar array of protective clothing: Quidditch goggles, Quidditch boots, an ill-fitting dueling vest, and a pair of thick dragon-hide gauntlets that reached half-way up its arms. Suited up, it was impossible to really even tell what sex it was.
Puffs were leaping at the figure and landing on it, trying to bite through the vest, gauntlets, boots, but the figure was angrily snatching them off just as fast, gripping them in its fist and remorselessly Incendio-ing them at point-blanc range, it's hands protected from the heat and flames by the dragon-hide, giving the Puffs no chance to escape.
The smoke from the screaming, immolated Puffs caused filthy streaks across the figure's face.
When another Puff reared up, the figure drew its foot back and kicked it, then stomped heavily down, reducing the Puff to a broken-ribbed pulp with one ferocious stamp.
The figure snapped its goggles back onto its smoke-smudged forehead to get a clearer view of the battle, and snorted with disgust. "Bloody hell, this sodding school, if it's not potions, it's Puffs!"
For one quite mad second, Harry thought it was Ron – but of all people it was Romilda Vane.
She looked about her and saw a clutch of third-years trapped on an adjacent landing, the one with the Hogwarts Shield on the wall. For a moment it looked it like she wasn't going to do anything about it – she was safe enough where she was, isolated on her stub of now Puff-free flooring – but then … "Oh – fucking fuck!" … She bounced onto a passing staircase, crouched as it swept her along, and then leapt off it, landing on the corridor-section on all fours and shooting the attacking Puff-Puppets in the back. Three Puffs leapt at her, and Harry half-yelped as he thought she'd lost it: she'd got one with an Incendio in mid air, but the other two were on her. She shot one with a point-blanc Impedimentia, wand actually touching the furball as she fired, but the other one was actually on her wand arm and there was no chance and –
Romilda Vane grabbed it with her free hand, bared her teeth, and ferociously bit down hard on its squealing head at the same time as yanking its body away from her.
There was a strange crunching, stretching, snapping and … Romilda Vane literally bit the head off a Pygmy Puff.
"How utterly horrid," complained Justin.
She spat the bits away, wiping her grimacing, bloodied mouth with the back of her dragon-gloved hand.
She had given no warning, partaken in no 'fighting-fair', held to no gentleman's dueling rules, she just had a brute determination to beat the odds to get what she wanted and would fight as dirty as it took.
Harry noticed that every time she killed a Puff, a nearby Puppet about her stopped and seemed to somehow wake up, look about it as though it had roused from sleepwalking, then give a sharp little cry, backing off from everything about it, then turning to run.
Turning back into a child.
Sometimes the fleeing figures were brought down by the surrounding Puppets before they could get away.
Despite their perilous situation, Harry and the group about him still stared after Romilda with expressions ranging from the politely querulous to the downright astonished.
Professor McGonagall coughed, "Well, her name does mean Magnificent Battle-Maiden. I imagine that the person who decided to call her that must have known something was coming."
The whump of the door behind them quaking in its frame jerked them all back to attention.
Harry looked wildly over his shoulder. The door was now leaking dust with every resounding shudder. He turned back to the scene of chaos before, above and below him.
"We're getting off this platform," announced Remus, grimly.
xxxx
Three minutes later, their small group was inching its way along what had been a sheer blank wall, with Remus and McGonagall in the lead, charming blocks of masonry half-way out from it to form a series of makeshift stepping stones, the smaller children mixed up with Neville and company in the middle, and Harry bringing up the rear.
It was a terrifying business. The 'steps' were less than a foot deep, the wall was sheer and the drop was vertiginous. They had scarce opportunity to use magic as most of them didn't dare use their wands, they were too busy using both hands to try and cling, shivering, to whatever scarce handholds the bare wall offered. Almost all the children were further hampered by flapping slippers and loose, trailing night-wear.
Neville had his wand clamped grimly between his teeth as he shuffled sideways in his slippers and pyjamas.
A lot of the smaller children were crying.
Crabbe and Goyle could scarcely stay on the steps, they were so bulky they were forced to lean back as they went and were in permanent danger of toppling. Once Crabbe did falter badly, losing his balance, arms starting to windmill wildly as his centre of gravity shifted against him. Goyle simply flung out a massive arm, caught Crabbe in the back and slammed him into the wall, whereupon Crabbe whimpered a little like a nervous piglet.
"Oi! You two! Will you stop messing about and climb properly!"
Crabbe and Goyle looked dumbly along at the angrily yelling Theodore Nott, looked at each other, exchanged puzzled, mewling sounds, but then followed orders and carried on traversing, expressions creased up in what, for them, was ferocious concentration.
There was noise and screaming and spellfire everywhere.
Below them, a hoard of Puffs and Puppets hissed and seethed, the Puppets hurling large chips of smashed staircase up at them, trying to knock them off whereupon they'd fall fifty feet to their deaths, smacking into the unyielding stone floor.
In turn, when possible, the Puppets were shot at by the Puff-less children on the various other landings, trying to put the Puppets off their aim.
Face to the wall, Harry almost laughed as he caught a glimpse of a boy with a Self-shooting Catapult periodically dodging from behind the cover of Richie Coote to rocket gobstones into the Puppets, the stones painfully punching into them at speed and knocking them over.
Then he stopped laughing as the door behind Harry finally burst open, hanging off its shattered hinges at a crazy angle.
Propelled uncontrollably forward by their sheer volition, the first in the ranks of the pursuing Puppets toppled over the edge of the short section of landing which remained, screaming as they windmilled through the air, smacking face-first into the stone-flagged floor fifty feet below.
They hit with a dull thud, a flat, wet, smacking impact, the power of which could almost be felt. Broken bones, battered muscles, split skin. Dead.
Harry felt the rush of breath in his lungs go cold with shock.
Looked like he wouldn't get the chance to kick Seamus Finnegan's arse in after all.
He didn't have the time to consider the horror of it as the remaining throng began to hurriedly scale along the narrow stepping stones. They were growling and snarling, moving fast, seemingly with no fear of falling, driven on by compulsion.
Only when some of few among them occasionally lost their footing, slipped and hopelessly tumbled, did some inner humanity rear up and they reverted to screaming, terrified children, seconds before they died.
The remainder – still freed of all natural fear – were moving much faster than Harry's group, whose feet were still slipping and fingers scrabbling.
They were going to be caught.
Harry had no doubt what would happen: there would be no elegant spellfire or sophisticated maneuvering. The Puff-Puppets would simply grab them, even though they would all tumble to their deaths.
The lead Puppet – a boy Harry thought he recognised from fourth-year Ravenclaw – reached out, snarling, moving hurriedly from stone to stone.
Harry was terrified at his speed.
But Harry's group were already going as fast as they could without falling!
The snarling Ravenclaw fourth-year was closing fast, almost within arm's reach now.
And then Harry froze. Because on a landing over to one side of the Entrance Hall, Ernie McMillan had made one pompous arm-wave too many, had taken too long to get off a spell, and a screaming Puff had bounced under Hannah Abbott's ever-weakening Protego and lunged at Ernie's throat, catching him there. Ernie had flailed, panicking, tripping backwards on his trailing night-coat and his foot slipped on the fractured edge of the broken-off landing and he went over.
Taking a horrified Hannah with him as he instinctively flung out an arm one last time, trying to arrest his fall.
Harry shouted and lurched for his wand, but he couldn't get the angle and -
The blond, pink, plump-cheeked, blue-eyed Hannah looked totally disbelieving. The expression on Ernie's face as he fell backwards was one of fright mixed with sheer outrage. They seemed to fall in slow-motion, as though something must surely happen to save them. But then the camera speeded up and they both smacked fatally into the stone flooring scores of feet below, sculls cracking backward into the floor with an irretrievable shattering. The sea of Puffs rolled back for a moment, quieting, almost surprised, but then surged upon them, biting and screeching, covering their bodies with a blanket of churning, seething fur.
Harry stared down, mouth open in incredulous horror.
"Harry, shoot!" yelled Remus.
Harry jerked his head up. The fourth-form Ravenclaw boy was almost upon him.
Shoot the boy?"Harry SHOOT!"
But he could see the boy's wild, rolling eyes – God, was that Stewart Ackerley?
Stewart Ackerley reached out to grab Harry Potter just as there was a yell of 'REDUCTO!' and the sets of steps at Stewart Ackerley's feet turned to dust as Neville, wand gripped in his fist, swung around wildly off the wall, suspended only by the mighty arm of Goyle, getting the angle for the shot. Goyle then crunched Neville back against the safety of the wall and Neville wobbled wildly as he occupied an empty step.
Stewart Ackerley crashed through the air, eyes wide with shock, but this time Remus could get the angle and could save Stewart in a way that he hadn't been able to save Ernie or Hannah.
Stewart landed in a stunned heap but Remus had slowed the fall so he had not been killed.
On the ground, the Puffs did not attack him as he was still one of their own.
"That was a close one!" Neville gave a high, trembling laugh.
Harry could feel Remus staring at him and could not look back.
Their group made their way along the wall, protected now by the Reducto'd gap, and they made the safety of Romilda Vane's landing.
They were still under assault though, the Puffs there were bounding at them and Puppets having to be hurled back by Impedimentias.
A phalanx of Puppets seemed to gather themselves, and then rushed at them in a group.
Neville turned to Theodore Nott and, though still shaking from his wall endeavour, stuttered out: "Hit it."
In a maneuver which looked practised, Neville dropped to one knee, facing away from Nott and toward the charging Puppets. From a pocket, Nott hauled out the triangular glass block Harry had seen with him on the train.
Nott leveled the glass triangle on the tripod of Neville's shoulder, the flat end of the triangle toward their attackers, and put his wand to the pointed end which faced him: "STUPEFY!"
Neville grimaced and rocked under the power of the spell as it ricocheted and multiplied through the prism, refracting, splitting off into many rays, one spell converted into many simultaneous ones.
The rays shot out of the flat end of the prism in a fanning blast of light and whammed straight into the onrushing Puppets.
It was the equivalent of a spell machine gun.
They had only had a few days in which to reactivate Dumbledore's Army – but clearly Neville had not wasted a minute of it.
The first three ranks of surging Puppets fell to the floor in a slumped, unconscious, tangled heap. Behind them, the remaining thickly packed, oncoming Puppets could not stop in time and hurtled into them, toppling over.
Nott looked ashen and knackered from having expended that much energy in one go, but it had done the job.
The hurtling Puppets were now a threshing, piled-up melee on the floor and were being picked off by explosive, point-blanc Impedimentia's and Stupefies.
In the crash of short-range spellfire, Romilda Vane turned wildly to Harry, "Where's that lanky, red-headed mate of yours?"Harry's mouth moved silently.
"He's dead," announced Remus bluntly, having heard it from McGonagall.
Romilda momentarily looked like she'd been slapped, then she blinked rapidly, shaking her head as though to angrily clear her vision. Saying nothing she turned and furiously blasted a Puff out of mid air with a spell so strong that it shot a chip out of the corridor wall.
She yanked her borrowed Quidditch goggles down so that no-one could see her eyes.
Harry stared at her. A quiet little jolt, like a mis-step in the dark. You never knew what anyone felt really. Not unless they said it. And sometimes they didn't say it. Not until it was all far too late.
He wanted to scream again but didn't dare because if he started he might never stop.
A lot of people had lost tonight. Some had lost their chances. Some had lost their lives.
He looked about at the milling, screaming, clawing, roaring, spell-shot pandemonium.
The Hogwarts' cats were hissing and spitting, claws out, fur on end and canines bared, calling upon their feral heritage as they went at the Puffs. But they were outnumbered. Some of them were already dead. Others were rolling end on end, covered in biting Puffs. A few were winning though, and punctured Puffs littered the floor, with several cats leaping about with struggling Puffs actually clenched within their clamped jaws.
If this was a Muggle war, the cats would need air-support.
But the owls were in the owlery, tethered by their jesses.
Harry looked dazedly about him: the platform they were on had a corridor leading from it that might allow them to the owlery, but it was thick with milling Puppets, rising groggily from their Stupefies and Impedimentias.
Some springing Puffs got through and Remus killed them: no magic, just brutally stomping on them with heel of his shoe. Harry would once have never have believed such ruthlessness of Remus, but he recalled him from the wedding – how grey and tired he had been, but with a fleck of new hardness about the eyes. Remus had changed, Remus had been forced to change, forced to adapt under the pressure of knowing first-hand what the likes of Fenrir Greyback were really capable of.
Greyback had damaged Remus just by existing, and he had sworn to finish the job by killing him.
In response, Remus had been forced to harden up or die.
And that was what war did to people: it made them ruthless. It forced them to step outside themselves and become someone else, just for that time it took.
It made them become killers.
Because they had to fight back with whatever it took against an enemy who was trying to kill them. Because if the other guy was trying to kill you, and you let him, then who was left to fight for those who weren't able to defend themselves and who were depending on you to do it for them?
Life wasn't a fairy story.
Turn the other cheek in a war, and you just got that slapped too.
Sometimes, some people had to get their hands dirty, accept responsibility for who they were and what they'd done, deal with it and carry on, knowing they'd done the best they could with what they'd had however awfully it had turned out.
Romilda Vane's screech ripped the air.
"For God's sake, get in the game, Potter!"And Harry ripped the Hogwarts shield off the wall and used it. Roaring, he ran towards the Puppets and gave those behind him only two choices: keep up with him and protect him, or abandon him.
They pounded at his heels.
He mowed into the Puppets protected by the Hogwarts shield – the Four Houses gathered about the letter 'H' – and smashed through them in a welter of spellfire and yelling.
They were on the long third-floor corridor now, and Harry now knew just where he was going.
He dived up the still-intact back-corridor and raced up the stairs, panting, then out along the seventh-floor corridor, along the stone passage toward an area with a tapestry on one side of the hallway and a blank stone wall on the other, yelling at full volume even as he neared it. "No time! Just give me a way to the owlery!"
And a mahogany door instantly appeared, far quicker than it ever had before, and Harry and his group lunged through it, a tangle of arms and legs as they all fought to get through at once. Remus and Professor McGonagall forced the younger students through, even as they hurled defensive spells back down the passageway at their now recuperating enemy.
Harry felt himself barged forward through the tight wedge of bodies as someone rammed him, putting their shoulder to him and shoving him through, toppling through after him.
"For God's sake, Potter! Put your bloody back into it, you sodding little slacker!"
Romilda Vane's repertoire of swearwords was as restricted as her repertoire of spells, but in both cases she made up for it with the sheer vehemence of her delivery.
The door slammed shut with a Colloportus from Remus, just as their pursuers reached it.
They looked about them: hauling for breath and stitch-ridden after their panic-fueled run; they were now locked in a very dark tunnel.
Crabbe or Goyle, Harry wasn't sure which, gave an uncertain little whimper.
Some of the younger children were openly crying.
They all jolted and gasped as torches, set high on the walls, magically ignited to produce a flickering, eerie light. They fell to silence as they saw they were in a high, narrow, stone passageway, lit by the shifting flames. There were stone snakes carved into the walls, their heads pointing the way down the passageway; in the flickering torchlight, they seemed to undulate. The passage narrowed ahead of them, before turning a slight corner so they could not see where it was taking them.
"Are you sure this castle's on our side?" whispered Terry Boot, still panting from his run.
There was a thump! on the door behind them, and they all started forward, hurrying down the corridor, Harry leading the way.
It turned out to be surprisingly easy, with the floor very smooth underfoot. The passage twisted and turned ahead of them, but they followed it.
"Why are we going to the owlery?" whispered Terry to Harry, looking nervously up and about him as though he still had reservations that the passage might yet somehow attack them.
"Because the owls can take out the Puffs!" hissed a voice Harry recognised as Theodore Nott's. "And when that's done, the kids they control will break down and drop out of the fight. Kill enough Puffs and we can still win this."
"Good," said Neville, who was still holding his side from a stitch. "If we're lucky, it might take us straight there."
Harry said nothing, he'd long given up trusting to luck.
He was right not to.
The Room of Requirement had done its best, but with garbled instructions and no time for the usual lengthy clarification, it had taken Harry at his word and 'given him a way to the owlery', but not taken him all the way into it.
The small door at the end of the passageway – it was so low that only the smallest children didn't need to stoop to pass through it, and both Crabbe and Goyle had a terribly tight squeeze – led out onto a small circular battlement at the top of a turret, only just big enough to hold them all.
They Colloportus'd the door shut behind them.
You could get to the owlery from there – which was all Harry had asked for – but only by dropping down onto a flying-buttress below them, and moving along it to a narrow walkway that led to the aviary.
A walkway that the giants were bombarding with rocks.
Crabbe and Goyle gave low, rumbling growls at the sight of the giants. Dull eyes narrowing, each holding their beater's bat firmly in one hand and tapping it against the other open palm.
"Oh, cut it out, you two!" snapped Nott.
Crabbe and Goyle looked abashed at him, and mewed like a couple of dogs who'd just been told-off.
A little girl standing between them gave a high wailing scream and pointed at the sky.
Dementors floated overhead, their coldness kept out by the still-standing wards, but also there surged and swooped the monstrous creations of the Ministry: Heliopaths.
"Bloody hell!" cried Terry.
The walkway to the owlery was scorched black in patches – evidently the wards were weakening and the Heliopaths had hurled fire there in one of their random attacks.
Harry saw that away in the night, at the edges of the forest, the centaurs still stood, shivering with uncertainty.
Bane was still waving his arms in the direction of the forest, but nobody moved toward it, even though they didn't move forward. Instead, their flanks rippling, their back legs kicking, they pawed the ground in anxiety, heads and voices high, hair being tossed from side to side.
In a field below them, a small figure screeched and gestured against them – firing random spells.
It was Umbridge and her crazy fear of the centaurs – of anything non-human and magical.
The centaurs ignored her, she was an irrelevancy.
"They could stop the giants! Why don't they come? Why don't they come!" yelled Harry.
But he knew why: fate. The centaurs believed in it. He recalled Bane: 'We are sworn not to set ourselves against the heavens. Have we not read what is to come in the movements of the planets?'. They were fatalists. They believed that what was to come, was defeat for those who opposed Voldemort. Harry knew that now. He remembered one of the first things he'd ever heard them say: Mars is bright tonight.
Mars.
War.
And they believed Voldemort would win this war and Voldemort had promised them everything. And all they had to do to get it, was stay out of a fight they did not believe could be won anyway …
On the parapet, all about him shot startled looks as the door behind them shook: a barrage of Puppets had hit it from the other side.
"Oh -! For God's sake!" yelped Terry Boot, caught between a half-laughing, disbelieving anger, and a high, shaky fear.
Harry looked back: they were less than fifty yards from the owlery, fifty yards from unleashing help, but they could not reach it.
He ran to the edge of the battlement where the giants were hurling rocks at the base of the wall and took a look, wand in hand.
"You can't take them down, Harry," Remus yelled. "Even going for the eyes with a Conjunctivitus Curse doesn't really stop them!"
"I can't believe this!" Harry screeched, "This isn't even the real fight! That'll happen when Hermione and Malfoy get stuck in that Chamber, we need to get in there and help them – and we can't even do that!"
The door thumped anew, and a lot of the little children skittered back, crying, trying to hide behind the teachers and the tall fifth and sixth-formers.
They were all trapped. None of them could get off the platform.
Above them, a Heliopath shot a random bolt of fire and everyone ducked.
Over his shoulder, Harry glimpsed a flash of ginger fur and swiveled toward it with a leap of hope: it was Crookshanks, racing along the walkway towards the owlery! But then a howling lurch of horror as the first four from a pursuing group of about twenty Puffs brought Crookshanks down from behind.
Harry swiveled back as the door shuddered on its hinges now, iron nails rattling loosely in their planks.
The whole group on the battlement, wands out and gazes locked to the doorway, instinctively stepped back away from it.
And one of the small children clustered behind them fell backward off the battlement.
Remus half turned and got off a spell that slowed the fall, but the child still hit the ground with an almost reverberating thump, and the giants saw it. They closed in.
Harry and his group tried to shoot the giants away, but was hopeless.
Behind them, they heard the door give way and it now hung off its hinges, with Puffs and Puppets fighting their way through, flailing against each other in the narrow gap.
Away on the walkway, Crookshanks rolled over and over, hissing, trying to throw off the increasing numbers of screeching, biting Puffs.
A Puff on the battlement broke forward and sprang straight at Harry's throat.
A group of Puppets lurched out of the jam at the doorway and hurtled towards them.
Umbridge was still squealing and shooting at the centaurs.
There was a high-pitched scream of pure terror from the child on the ground, and the answering screams of those little children still on the battlements: the screaming of foals.
And then time seemed to slow and it all just … happened.
A great rushing, swooshing sound; a thick blanket of black, arching swiftly through the night; a rumbling upon the earth.
Ron had once mentioned Agincourt, referring to it – as wizards are wont to do – as though it had simply been won by magic and that Muggles had somehow just happened to be there, milling about, making an embarrassing mess of things whilst the wizards got on with the real business.
But that was not what had happened at all.
It had been won by five thousand, thoroughly un-magical, small, grubby men, out-numbered four-to-one, standing their ground before an onslaught of onrushing, mounted, armoured and armed French knights and … defeating them with bits of wood: arrows.
A massive flight of arrows sliced into the Giants who then stumbled around in squealing confusion. Across at the edge of the forest, there was a huge movement, like an avalanche breaking away. Half the centaurs had broken rank of their own individual accord. Nobody leading, no-one giving particular orders, just all acting in unspoken concert. They swept down upon the giants, shooting as they rode, trampling over the shrieking Umbridge.
Foals were screaming and 'fate' be damned.
Moving as a tight group, they ploughed through the Giants, scattering them, catching up the crying child and carrying it to safety in a single wave of sleek-moving muscle.
Then the cat, forgotten in Harry's jacket, abruptly struggled awake from the earlier Stupefy and reached out a slashing paw, catching the Puff springing at Harry in mid-flight. With cat-claws dug in, Millicent Bulstrode's cat fought its way out of Harry's jacket and sank its fangs straight into the Puff as the two rolled over and over on the floor, the cat hissing, clawing, biting and raking.
A single cat versus a single Puff?
The Puff's eyes bulged as it screeched and struggled to escape.
Over on the walkway, a streak of black and white leapt through the air: a cat in a 'tuxedo', Mr. Tibbles, the James Bond of Kneazles.
With an economic efficiency, he leapt over the intervening Puffs and landed at Crookshanks' side, biting straight through the necks of many of the Puffs there, shaking them and throwing them off.
Crookshanks - back in the match, Puffs sent flying – hurtled again for the owlery.
Mr. Tibbles swerved about to face the onrush of remaining Puffs as an astounding figure lurched from the opposite end of the walkway.
It looked like a clumsy, clanking, walking suit of armour.
Which it was: Filch.
Utterly Puff-proof.
He had never cared for the Hogwarts children, he had possibly never even particularly cared much for the school, but he had loved his cat.
And he wanted revenge.
He had dressed up in the armour he had earlier become entangled with and had set off along the many secret passages he knew, aiming for the owlery to release the owls.
Now he clanked down the walkway, ignoring the Puffs where he could not stomp on them but he drove them off Mr. Tibbles – who was at least another cat, if not the beloved Mrs. Norris.
On the battlement Harry felt the iron grip of a Puff-Puppet on him as it grabbed for his throat.
The platform was now thick with them, and all about was close-quarters fighting.
Below him, Crookshanks raced to the owlery door, leapt up, caught the latch in his front paws and hung there, back legs kicking on empty air until the latch dropped under his heavy weight and he sped in, with Mr. Tibbles and Filch alternately racing and clanking in after him, cutting the owls from their jesses.
Harry and his group struggled madly on the battlement, it was hand-to-hand now, and the Puppets were horrifyingly strong.
And then … owls exploded out of the owlery.
An eruption of feathers and wingbeats and screeching fury.
The owls stormed down, attacked the Pygmy-Puffs, talons ripping, beaks tearing, and every second a child broke free of the mental grip of its now-dead Puff and, shocked and crying, either collapsed sobbing or ran away in tears.
But the Puppet at Harry's neck was still there and his neck was almost snapping.
" …idiotic, foolish, consorting with the impure; an ugly, stupid boy who is churlish at school and casts insults upon the noble House of Slytherin …"
The Puppet around Harry's neck was cast back, as were all the remaining others there.
" … a thief and a liar, a vainglory seeking lout who threatens women, who cheats at Quidditch, who rides an unfair broom, who lies to teachers and sneaks about the school showing off with his ludicrously expensive Cloak …"
Kreacher …?
"… who cheats in exams by getting extra marks for a spell that no-one else has even been taught in official lessons …"
Behind them, the Durmstrang boat broke the surface of the lake, erupting prow first, shooting almost vertically out of the water like a surfacing submarine. Too big and too powerful for any number of underwater Inferi to take down.
Through the sky, the Beauxbatons carriage surged towards them, radiating a blinding light that reduced the Dementors to dust.
Some very thestralish Heliopaths cantered peaceably about in the sky.
All over the school, as the owls and cats did their job, Puppets awoke and burst into tears, shocked and crying.
" … being invisible to steal from shops and -"
"I never used my Cloak to steal from shops!" squeaked Harry, hand to his half-choked throat.
" … and to spy on the Hogwarts shower rooms of innocent school-maidens."
"I DID WHAT?"
"Harry Potter, Sir," that last word was pronounced with a sly unctuousness, "did instruct Kreacher – poor, lowly, abused, traduced, compelled to work for the undeserving, Kreacher - to 'save the insults till later'." Kreacher, gave a prim, simpering, self-congratulatory little smirk at his next words, "Kreacher chose to do it now …"
Dobby was practically the only house-elf who could think for himself, but 'practically' meant not quite the only one.
Kreacher too could think for himself – simply not in a way that Harry usually liked.
Harry noticed that Kreacher was horribly bitten and covered in scratches. A huge gash ran down one side of his rib-cage.
He had been in some terrible Puff-fights.
"The Durmstrang boat, and the carriage?" gasped the rather put-upon sounding Justin Finch-Fletchley, night-coat torn, face bruised, and one slipper missing. "Not that I'm complaining, you understand!"
A small voice yelled from inside Harry's pocket. "For heaven's sake – I've been roaring at Potter for half-an-hour! Is that boy deaf? I went long-range to Durmstrang and Beauxbatons – do you think they'd stand by and do nothing if they knew about all this? All someone had to do was keep their head and remember to ask!"
It was the miniature portrait of Phineas Nigellus.
"I have been trying to tell Potter!" it yelled. "It's hardly my fault if Potter didn't pass the message on!"
The people on the battlements turned to stare at the flustered Harry.
"But I - I! Honest! I -!"
"Mister Potter, you really could have told us!" announced Professor McGonagall, hat askew and a nasty cut on her neck.
"But – he – I -"
Romilda Vane – smoke blackened and hair all over the place – snorted one word: "Typical!"
AURTHOR'S NOTE: a very long chapter and I did consider chopping it up into it's constituent sections but ... the rhythm of the chapter simply played far better as one long piece. I wanted the reader to be under the same sense of increasing pressure as the characters, then suddenly we get that gushing release.
Hope it worked for you.